"Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

I was incredibly happy when my parents one day came home with an Atari 800XL and an Atari 1050 Floppy Drive, we eventually managed to get one of those Happy Chips, now that was awesome!

The Happy Drive changed the beep-beep beep...beep. Into Beeepbeepbeep. Well okay, hard to describe the sounds, but it actually played sound through the monitor as it loaded. I also recall it making some weird farting noises as it'd load up specifically BASIC games.

A friend of mine had a C-64 and it was horrible, even with the fastloader cartridge he had, he'd start loading up a game from floppy, go upstairs, make a sandwich, come back down stairs, and watch a movie, then it'd finally load.

Go figure that due to the 8-bit era, I ended up getting an Atari ST, and he ended up getting an Amiga. Even though the makers of each switched teams and I ended up getting the real descendant of the C64, and he got the one from the Atari 8-bits.